Costume designs of the Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj in the ITIdata Semantic Database
As part of the Danube-AI subproject of the National Digital Heritage Laboratory, the costume designs kept in the documentation repository of the Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj-Napoca were digitised in 2022.
The metadata of the costume designs related to the 94 performances of the Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj-Napoca between 1959 and 1980, as well as information related to each performance, were entered into the Wikibase-based semantic database ITIdata of the Institute of Literary Studies of the Centre for Humanities Research (https://n9.cl/c3obz). This will provide theatre historians with context for research on the social history of theatre in the 1960s and 1970s.
ITIdata is primarily a space for literary research, so hosting a theatre history project raised challenges. One of our main questions was what specification to develop for the costume design records, what new properties and entities were needed for optimal implementation, and into which existing data network to integrate the costume design records. We opted for semi-automatic data loading.
The standardised data structure developed in ITIdata, based on semantic web technology, allows us to aggregate the complex set of relationships we have mapped to the Europeana Data Model. Our system is also prepared for data enrichment with Wikidata. High-resolution digital surrogates of the costume designs have been created that meet the quality standards required by Europeana. We hope that our collection can serve as a model for other semantic web-based aggregation projects - join this session to learn more.
